The Texas Education Agency (TEA) will expand its letter-grade accountability rating in the coming school year to include campuses as well as school districts.
For the past few years, TEA’s accountability system has assigned an A through F letter grade for school districts, but has simply rated individual campuses as either “met standards” or “improvement required.”
That will change with the start of the 2019-20 school year, said Dr. Rachael McClain, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at Snyder ISD.
“People will see a letter grade for the campuses, just like they see on their child’s report card,” McClain said.
If the letter-grade system had been in effect during the last school year, McClain said Snyder High School and Snyder Intermediate School would have received a C grade, Snyder Primary School would have received a D and Snyder Junior High School would have been given a grade of F.
While not opposed to the new letter-grading system, McClain is concerned it won’t tell the complete story about how students are performing at the individual campuses.
“I would like to be able to communicate to parents that this accountability system will not be very transparent, because there are so many data points to consider,” she said. “I know parents will look at the letter grade, but the system is much more convoluted than that. It’s hard to assign a letter grade to the hundreds and hundreds of data points the state considers in their accountability system.”
Among the data points McClain was referring to are State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test scores among students in various socio-economic and racial sub-groups. The more diverse a campus, the more it historically struggles to achieve a high letter grade, McClain said.
“When you have a diverse population of students, especially districts that have a high number of low socio-economic students, those districts tend to congregate around the C and D level,” she said. “They tend to struggle more with test scores than schools at the A and B level.”
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